Missing sim

[Jessicakeene]

So my sim just got back from university and was travelling home and now she’s in her home town but the sim icon has gone? It isn’t even let me open the sim panel or anything? But I can see my sim on screen?  Please help! I worked so long at completing the uni and I don’t wanna lose the game  

[puzzlezaddict]

@Jessicakeene  It looks like your travel transition broke, which is not unusual for an unmodified TS3.  The best thing to do is to revert to a save right before travel and then try to send your sim home again.  Even if you saved after this glitch appeared, you should still have at least one backup in your saves folder (in Documents\EA\TS3\Saves).  It will have a .backup extension, so if your main save file is SunsetValley.sims3, your backup would be SunsetValley.sims3.backup.  If you delete the extension and rename the save file (so, say, SunsetValley1.sims3), it will show up as an available save to load at the Main Menu.  Now would be a good time to make copies of this backup and store them somewhere safe, in case something else goes wrong.

In the future, it's best to only attempt a travel transition right after you start up the game and load your save, when your RAM use will be at its lowest.  It's also a good idea to use "save as" often—I do so at least once every sim-day—so that you have backup saves to which you can revert if you encounter another glitch.  If you send your sim home again and she still doesn't show up, quit, reload, and try temporarily turning down all of your graphics options to the minimum.  This will decrease the load on the game engine.  You can turn them back up when your sim is safe in her homeworld.

[Jessicakeene]

hey, thanks for replying so i managed to get the old back up game but but the same thing keeps happening when travelling home... and I turnt down the game graphics :-( 

[puzzlezaddict]

@Jessicakeene  Unfortunately, the travel transition was never properly fixed by EA.  The other things you can do to try to get through it are to play completely offline (not logged in, and turn wifi off on your computer), disable memories and delete all or most of them on your active sim, and turn off the hidden object interactive loading screen.  And if your sim's inventory is overloaded, try to clean it out—a couple dozen objects should be okay, but a couple hundred would be a problem.  It would also be a good idea to delete the cache files in your game folder before you try again.  In fact, it's a good idea to clear them after every game session, as they'll regenerate and fill with useless junk.  For reference, they are:

CASPartCache.package

compositorCache.package

scriptCache.package

simCompositorCache.package

socialCache.package

Edit:  And go to the FeaturedItems folder in your game folder.  You can delete everything in there too.

If this doesn't work, there are mods that can help, but I don't know whether you'd be interested in adding them to your game.